So I left the last blog at the end of the trek while I suffered, not so much in silence, as very vocal agony!! The couple of days after the trek were spent not surprisingly doing very very little! I had 3 days in Pokhara after the trek and the most exciting thing that happened during those three days was moving to a nice new hotel courtesy of Triona who treated me for my birthday. The new hotel was lovely and had a fantastic view....although I made the mistake of getting a room on the 5th floor and after all the steps on the trek, this suddenly seemed like a rather stupid idea! But as I said the views of the mountains were amazing so I won’t complain about my silly decision....too much anyway!! Pokhara was a nice place to relax after the trek, pretty much ate, drank and relaxed. We did venture to Old Pokhara one of the days and spent an hour or two wandering around but it didn’t get much more exciting than that!!
So we moved on from Pokhara and headed back down to Chitwan for another couple of relaxing days. It was back to the Mona Lisa Hotel for me and Madan from the hotel was meeting us from the bus station. When we got off and got our bags and got through the gaggle of taxi drivers wanting us to take us to a million different hotels Madan told us he had a surprise....and pointed to two camels just past all the vans and jeeps that were around. He said that the hotel jeep was out for the day so the hotel had arranged a special surprise and new experience to take us to the hotel. Myself and Joe immediately started laughing thinking it was a joke. I had spotted the two camels as I got off the bus and I thought that Madan had decided to have a bit of fun with us...except he wasn’t laughing anyway like me and Joe were...and then it suddenly dawned on me that the hotel did actually have two camels. And so we walked ever closer to them and the next thing you know I was on the back of a camel plodding down the road with lots of jeeps full of tourists passing us by. I thought it was great fun, bit jolty and the camels seemed to be rather hungry and constantly wanting to stop to eat. Joe’s camel wasn’t in a great mood at all and was being slightly stubborn...but that just gave me even more amusement!! After we arrived at the hotel I was sitting around relaxing when Madan shouted at us that there was a snake in the tree. I ran down to have a look expecting to see a little dinky snake and instead saw the biggest snake I have ever seen (aside from the big massive ones in zoos, but they don’t count in this instance cause this one was out in the wild!!). It was a white snake and had gotten its way to the top of the tree to attack a bird’s nest and eat the young that were in it. Then it slithered its way back down the tree and that’s when I saw it. Once I saw where Madan was pointing I got all excited and then as I kept looking and saw more and more of it going up the branch I won’t lie when I say that I took a step or two back. It was very majestic to watch it, especially as it got to the bottom of the tree and most of its body wasn’t in contact with any branches and it was almost floating in mid air...until it just dropped itself out of the tree in a rather inelegant fashion and plopped to the ground, and then it took off like lightening into the jungle! So within an hour of being back in Chitwan I was already having lots of adventures and remembering why I loved the place so much!! The rest of the day was relatively relaxing, as was the following day...that was until Rhino Day happened!! There were rumours that there were rhinos down by the river front so Pete brought me down in the evening as he had seen them earlier in the day. When I got there we actually couldn't see any of them and I was slightly disappointed but we hung around for awhile and then saw one sleeping through the grass. We had a little walk around to try get a better look and managed to worm our way into the long grasses but up on a bank so that at least of anything came running for us we had a slight height advantage!! So there I was taking photos of this absolutely huge, magnificent creature...and then another one came along!!! I was so excited to see the two of them. It was a mother and her calf but I’d say it was more of a teenager than a baby judging by the size of it!! I stood there for a good while just looking at them and watching them come closer to graze; luckily they walked the opposite direction again before they got a bit too close for comfort. But again it was another testament to how absolutely amazing Chitwan is!
The third day in Chitwan was my absolute favourite out of all the time I spent down there. Keshab, the owner of the hotel, is involved with a charity called Child Welfare Organisation. This charity is run by a woman called Miriam from Belgium and there was three nurses over from Belgium to go to a local village to provide them with a free medical care day. As there was a few of us from UKtoOz down in Chitwan we said that we would love to help out and they were delighted with the extra volunteers. We were up at 6am to head out to the village. The other guys who were down there, Rachel, Rhona, Brian and Pete had been out with Keshab a couple of days previous in a few of the villages but it was my first time to see that side of Nepal. As we drove through the villages I wasn’t too surprised, they were small and remote like Suaraha where the Mona Lisa Hotel is. But we kept on driving and next thing I knew we were driving through corn fields going out to the remotest part of Chitwan. We arrived at the village and there was nothing except little mud and reed huts where the families lived. Then we drove into a clearing and I was hugely surprised to see two big, blue, concrete buildings. One of the buildings was a school and the other a day care centre which had been built with the proceeds from the charity. The school was amazing, it was very basic by our standards but considering that the village consisted of almost nothing else this was an amazing thing from them to have. The classroom walls were covered in the alphabet and times tables and all that sort of thing. There was also posters and paintings sent from schools in the Netherlands and Belgium who had also done fundraising for the schools. Along with the two school buildings there was also a toilet block and a well. The toilet block is something that has helped the people of the village immensely. Most women in rural areas of Nepal don’t wash properly as they only have access to water at rivers or if they are really lucky at public wells. Because they are in public they don’t wash properly as they have to wash with their clothes on them so they often suffer from sores and infections. When the toilet block was built it gave the women, and of course everyone else in the village, the opportunity to be able to wash in private and as such properly look after themselves and try to keep healthy. The well also gave them a new quality of life as the villagers had access to pure clean water. The only problem with the well is that a lot of people from the village and surrounding areas have to put aside 6 hours of their day to get to the well, fill their containers and walk all the way back home with the heavy containers on their backs. I had a go at drawing water up from the well and after the first couple of dismal attempts where I didn’t even get enough water in the bucket to make a cup of tea I finally got the hang of filling the bucket properly. Of course once it was filled properly it was a lot of hard work on the old arm muscles to draw it up from the bottom of the 40 foot well!
Once I had had a look around it was time to start getting ourselves ready, and by 7.30 people were starting to arrive. The purpose of the day was to allow people to come and visit a doctor free of charge and to get any medicine they might need, also free of charge. We non-medical volunteers were to show the children how to properly wash their hands and once they had been shown they all got a bar of soap. At first the children were all very timid and reluctant to come over to the strange white people! But one by one curiosity got the better of them and they came over to see what we were doing and then started joining a queue to have a go themselves. It was absolutely amazing. I know showing someone how to wash their hands sounds trivial but to these people it was obviously something that was very important to them and something they needed to be shown. Everything is so dusty there that dust just sticks and when we were washing the kids hands, while the soap on our hands was relitively white, the soap on the kids hands ranged through many different shades of brown. We had a supply of 300 bars of soap...and ran out of that after a couple of hours!! We had kids of all ages coming up to us, some only about a year old and others up to about 12 years old. And once they had been shown they all stood and sat around to watch everyone else and just to see some of the fun we were having with the other kids.
While I was taking a water break I was talking to Keshab who told me a little bit about the village. He said that there used to be about 1200 families living in the village and up to about 8 years ago a lot of them lived underground in little dugouts as they had no materials to build a hut. He also said that if anyone unfamiliar to them came into the village or the surrounding area they would run away and hide as they weren’t used to outside people and they didn’t trust people. Keshab said that a lot of the people were living in the village as their homes had been destroyed by landslides over the years. The government had then started moving families to better areas but there was still something like 800 families in the area that still needed a lot of help to be able to live a proper life, which was why something like the medical day and the building of the schools were appreciated so much the villagers.
Overall out of the 800 odd families nearly 400 came to the medical day to see the doctors. There were a couple of heartbreaking stories. One woman had a large tumour on the inside on her left thigh. She had had it for a number of years but never had the money to go to a doctor. The doctors arranged for her to be brought to the hospital the following day to get it removed and checked. They imagined that the tumour would be cancerous but even removing it would have improved the woman’s life a lot. There was another woman who had a tumour between her fingers on her left hand. The tumour had trapped a nerve and had paralysed her left arm. Again it was arranged for her to go to the hospital to get it removed and the doctors thought that once it was gone she would regain some if not all movement in her arm. A story that particularly touched me was of a little boy who was about 4 years old. His grandmother brought him over to us when we were doing the hand washing to get his nails clipped and cleaned. When she first came over he was on her back and when she spun him around to her front so that we could do his nails he started to cry. His grandmother pointed to his grown and pulled on his shorts a little so we could see there was a large, hard growth between his groin and high. The poor thing was obviously in agony and we pointed out where she needed to bring him for the doctor. Seeing the little boy in so much pain affected me quite a bit and it dawned on me that at home if that happened to any one of us or a kid we know it would be minutes before he was put in a car as soon as there was sign of a growth. This little boy however had obviously been suffering for a long time as he just doesn’t have access to any type of medical treatment. Keshab the next day when he was filling us in told us that the boy had been brought to hospital and that he was going in for an operation the next day to remove the growth and assess any damage that had been done to his muscles to see if there would be any lasting damage. Keshab also said that 8 other people were being brought to hospital for a full work up to diagnose symptoms they had but that couldn’t be diagnosed without further investigation with medical equipment. It was great to hear how the day had helped so many people, some in a little way and some in a huge way. And it was great to be part of something like that.
When everyone had been seen by the doctors we were all just waiting around to head back after cleaning up. There was still a few of the local kids hanging around and they got brave and sat down on the bench beside me and Rhona. We took a picture of them and then showed them the picture and their faces lit up. It was funny though because when we held up the camera their faces got all serious cause they didn’t know what it was but then once we showed them the picture they would start smiling and laughing. They then started getting brave and started inching closer to where I was sitting on the bench. I started messing with them and moving slowly closer to them too. Then a couple more kids came over to the bench and then next thing I knew I was playing a full blown game with them on the bench which then developed into me chasing them around the school grounds! They were smiling and laughing and even some of the women of the village were watching all the hi-jinx and laughing away. Two of the kids were absolutely adorable and myself and Rhona fell in love with them. When I was chasing them they would run to the opposite side if the yard. I’d then turn my back to them and they would start creeping closer and then I would turn around and chase them again. Then they started staying at the other side of the yard and then started turning around and wiggling their bums at us...which was something I used to do as I kid when I was playing chasing so it was amazing and funny to see these kids do the exact same thing I did years ago half a world away doing the exact same thing. We had great fun with them for a couple of hours and then unfortunately it was time to head back to the hotel. Driving away in the jeep broke my heart a little as even though I had only spent half a day there I absolutely loved being there and meeting all the people, especially the kids. The medical day or anything along those lines is not something I expected to experience while I was on the trip but it was a day that I will always remember and is definitely one of my favourite days of the trip.
That evening we all headed out to the Tharu Cultural Show. We had seen the stick dancing show the first time we were down in Chitwan with the whole group in the hotel grounds but every night the show is put on in a local centre. So for something to do we all headed down to check it out again. It was just as good as the first time and wasn’t boring in the slightest to see it a second time. We then all headed to a restaurant for dinner and a few drinks before leaving Chitwan the next day. The bus journey from Chitwan to Kathmandu was an interesting one. I wasn’t feeling particularly well and got stuck with the first ignorant Nepalese person I met sitting right in front of me!! He got on and told the people in front of him to unrecline their seats...and then promptly reclined his right back and jammed my knees against the back of his seat. Now normally I don’t mind people reclining their chairs but considering I wasn’t feeling well and had managed to position myself in such a way that I felt slightly comfortable I wasn’t really in the mood for taking anyone’s shit!! So I asked the dude who worked on the bus to ask him to move his seat forward so that my legs weren’t jammed...which he did...and then as soon as the bus dude walked away the gobshite reclined it straight back down again!! So I ended up spending the majority of the 6 hour journey pressing my arms against his seat so that I had a bit of space for my legs! Needless to say it isn’t the most comfortable of journeys that I have ever had!! One good thing that did happen on the journey though was bumping into some of the other UktoOzers! Some of the group had done a 2 day white-water rafting trip and randomly in the middle of absolutely nowhere at the side of a river, our bus pulled over and who did we pick up only Dee, Andy, Bui, Kev, Sally, Donald and Graham! Extremely odd bump into people you know in the absolute middle of nowhere in Nepal! Once we got to Kathmandu we got a taxi to Patan where we had decided to spend a couple of days before going to the madness of Kathmandu!
Patan itself is about 5 km outside of Kathmandu but feels like a whole world away in terms of how busy and noisy it is. When we were driving into Kathmandu on the bus all I was thinking was how similar to India it was; full of traffic, beeping, dust and noise. So to drive in and then drive straight back out again was definitely welcome! Patan was lovely but I wasn’t feeling great for the couple of days that I was there so didn’t enjoy it as much as I would have liked. I did manage to explore it thoroughly though and managed to fully complete for the first time all trip a Lonely Planet walk! This felt quite a feat as usually when we do a recommended walk from the Lonely Planet we get lost half way through due to directions along the lines of “past the temple, (a MILLION temples on every street in these countries!!) on the right hand side is a gated entrance to a courtyard with an old style wooden window. Look for the sign that advertises Opera Eye Wear”....so you can see why we might get lost from time to time. It was lovely to wander around Patan though and take in all the different temples and Durbar Square at the heart of Patan was lovely with all the old temples that were built there. There are a number of Durbar Squares across Nepal in different cities and towns. A Durbar Square is a concentrated mass of temples. In Patan most of the temples were built between the 14th and 18th centuries and contains 9 magnificent temples, the Royal Palace and Patan Museum. After a 2 day break in Patan exploring as much as possible when it wasn’t too hot and while trying to convince myself that I wasn’t ill it was time to go back to Kathmandu and meet up with everyone else.
Kathmandu turned out to be not as terrible as I thought it was going to be!! First impressions weren’t exactly favourable but where we were staying in Kathmandu was away from the big dusty hustle and bustle and was in the centre of Thamel, which is the tourist district. It was all little narrow streets with people getting precariously close in passing motorbikes and cars and full of backpacker shops and “hippy clothes” shops as I call them. At this stage I couldn’t deny that I was actually ill so I took it easy for the first couple of days in Kathmandu. And then a momentous day arrived for us UKtoOz people....we had found a cinema that screened English speaking movies and we were finally going to get to see HARRY POTTER!!!! I know this may seem slightly out of tune with the whole overlanding life and considering the amazing countries and places we had been to seeing Harry Potter possibly shouldn’t have been so high on our list of priorities but we were all dying to see it and once we had sussed out cinemas there was no stopping us! Plus it’s nice to do something from “normal life” every now and then!! So off we all pottered to the cinema and had a nice day...helped that it was nice and air conditioned too!! We all really enjoyed the movie, though once again I had a small issue with putting 3D glasses on over my actual glasses...speccy 4 eyes doesn’t even begin to cover it!!! I really enjoyed the movie, though we all had a few suspicions that a few scenes may have been edited out so will have to investigate and watch it again on DVD somewhere!! When the movie was over we all headed to KFC...so it really was just like a normal Saturday afternoon out!
It was then time to head back to get ready for a big night out. I can’t remember if I mentioned in one of my previous blogs that we found out there was a chance we wouldn’t get to go through Tibet and China due to the borders being closed, which would have meant losing the truck and having to make a flight over the two countries. We were given the choice to just fly straight away or to delay the trip by 10 days to make an attempt at getting into the country, this was the option we went for and so we spent an extra 4 days in India and an extra 6 days in Nepal. So we waited it out enjoyed the extra time in the 2 countries and kept our fingers crossed. However on my second stint in Chitwan we got the really disappointing news that the borders weren’t being opened til much later than we thought and so we were informed that we were falling back onto our contingency plan which was to fly over Tibet and China and lose our lovely truck and Greg our driver. I was really disappointed as I had been looking forward to seeing Tibet after getting a little taste of it in McLeod Ganj in India. After some thinking about it thought I realised that as disappointed as I was about missing out on what would have been two amazing countries I was more upset about the fact we would no longer be travelling on our truck. Although we would still be overlanding as once we flew over the two countries we would be travelling on buses and public transport the whole way still, not having our truck would make it a different kind of trip. But there was nothing that could be done about it so after a few hours of great disappointment we started looking forward to a new kind of adventure and moving on to more countries in a totally different way. However there was still the great disappointment of losing Greg from our trip so on Harry Potter day we arranged to have a little send off for him. We booked a table in the Everest Steak House in Kathmandu and while everyone was in a bar having a few drinks myself and Rosie popped out to go decorate the table. We arrived into the restaurant and whipped out a bag of balloons...which the 5 staff members in the restaurant kindly blew up for us. We then waited at the restaurant for the others to arrive and Greg got a nice little surprise when he walked in. We had a great meal with plenty of craic going on. Myself and Rhona shared a Chateaux Briand (or something along those lines!!!) which apparently is the best cut of meat you can have for a steak! So after watching everyone else tucking into steaks since we had arrived in Nepal me and Rhona decided (on the trek a couple of weeks previous!!!) that we were going to share one (because they are MASSIVE...and we halved a half one too!!!). Not being a huge steak eater I was worried I wasn’t going to eat a lot of it....my God I devoured the big slab of meat that was put down in front of me!!!! Once the meal was over and a few drinks had been consumed we decided it was a great idea to draw a smiley face on Greg’s head!! So I whipped a purple marker out and next thing we knew he had a big smiley face on his bald head!! Of course the creative juices were flowing then and he suddenly had grey hair to match followed by a handlebar moustache and goatee beard!!! We then whipped the tinsel we had wrapped his chair in off the chair and around him and then left the restaurant and walked down the centre of Kathmandu!! We ended up then in an Irish bar for a few more drinks and frolics before finishing up the night and heading home. It really was one of my favourite nights out throughout the whole trip but was tainted slightly when I thought about why we were having the night out. The following day was spent sorting out posting all our extra stuff home as without the truck we know had to carry everything with us, so there were many bags purged of crap over those few days!!! We had been to the truck a couple of mornings before to go and get all our stuff, including tents and sleeping equipment off it. While we had been on the break in Nepal the truck was in a garage getting resprayed and all prettified for us as a surprise. When we got to the garage I felt like I did on the first day when I saw it! I forgot how big it was; it just seemed absolutely massive again. And with the new paint job it just looked beautiful sitting there. Once we had cleared all the stuff off the truck it was time to go and it was so so hard to walk away from that truck. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t shed a tear as we drove away. I know it might seem stupid to get upset over a truck but aside from the people I am travelling with the truck was the only thing that was a constant for me on the trip. The places we were staying and the countries we were in were constantly changing but the truck was just always there. Don’t get me wrong I love the travelling and getting to see all these new places but it was nice to have something familiar all the time....it is pretty much the closest thing to what I’d call a home on the trip. So it was just upsetting to leave it and to know that I was never going to be on it again. We had some great times on the truck and even though I know there will still be great times on the trip still it was sad to say goodbye to what I guess I came to see as the symbol of my overlanding trip. But I have my memories and pictures and just hope that the people who have the truck next appreciate it as much as we all did!
Anyway that’s my little tearful moment over with! Back to the fun stuff!! Once I had sorted out all my postage myself and Kev went on a walk around Kathmandu. Since I had arrived in Kathmandu I hadn’t done a lot in terms of seeing the sights so we grabbed a few spare hours and headed off to explore. We went down to Kathmandu Durbar Square which was really impressive. The temples were much bigger than those in Patan, and they even had a couple of shrines that were completely ruined as they had these massive trees growing out of them! It was nice to just wander through the streets though as no matter what street we turned down there was always something to see, be it a temple, a shrine or just some random part of local people’s lives that it unusual to us. After a couple of hours we headed back to the hotel to get ready for our last dinner in Nepal. We were going back to a restaurant we had been to on our first night in Kathmandu where the food was amazing and I was really looking forward to it. However while I was packing up in my room I started to feel really unwell and a few hours later could hardly move as I felt so poorly. So I gave dinner a miss and stayed home curled up in a little ball on my bed! Needless to say I did not have a good night that night with a bucket within reach by the side of my bed!!! I had serious doubts that I was actually going to make it onto our flight to Bangkok the next morning! I managed to get a couple of hours of sleep and thankfully felt slightly better in the morning. So with bags on our backs and mini buses waiting to take us to the airport we said goodbye to Nepal.
I spent a whole month in Nepal and can honestly say that I loved every minute of it. Whether I was in the jungles of Chitwan or in the craziness that was Thamel in Kathmandu I absolutely loved it. And no when I say I loved every minute of it I don’t have a mental block on the week of the trek!! As I said in my last blog as hard as it was I don’t regret for a minute doing it and I saw some amazing scenery and climbed a Himalayan mountain, which I never thought would be something I would ever add to my list of achievements!! I met some amazing people in Nepal, especially the staff from the Mona Lisa Hotel in Chitwan who made us feel so welcome and really looked after us. And it wasn’t just looking after us as guests we had a really good time with them had nights out with them. And the most amazing thing I did with them was the medical day which is something I will never ever forget. That is definitely up there with the best days of both Nepal and the trip in general. So Nepal brought me elephants, rhinos, Himalayan Mountains, new friends and some absolutely AMAZING memories. It was where I celebrated my birthday in the most unusual way that I have probably ever celebrated my birthday and I think I can probably put it down as my favourite country so far. It’s somewhere that I can see myself going back to many times in the future as it is easy to see that I can experience loads of different types of holidays there, and mostly importantly things are constantly changing; case in point is seeing rhinos on my second trip down to Chitwan. Of all the countries to get to spend a whole month in I don’t think we could have been any luckier to have that country as Nepal.
And so we are now about to begin the second leg of our journey. This point was always going to be phase two after having our two week break but it is definitely getting off to a different start as we now have a totally different type of adventure ahead of us without the truck. So South East Asia awaits us and I cannot wait to see what it holds for us.
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